SPEEDRUN with a16z's Josh Lu and Andrew Lee

do you have 15 minutes strong core team and an idea dream about pursuing if you said yes three times you're in for an opportunity of a life also known as speedrun now speedrun is a program for game startups unlike anything you've seen before first all teams accepted to the program receive 500 000 of funding from a16z and a16z is probably one of the best funds in the world secondly your team will be welcome to San Francisco for 10 weeks to work out of the offices of a16z on your demo and that demo will be showcased to over 300 investors during the upcoming GDC and thirdly you'll get the best of the best mentors to make sure your demo will blow everybody's socks off and by mentors I mean the likes of founders of Zynga supercell King Discord and so forth now you'll have till the end of September to apply so act fast there's an application link below in the

description of this podcast and I suggest that you use code dof for extra Goodwill with your application and this is not a paid promotion this is we're doing this because I think this program is awesome and I would have applied if this was still if this would have been a thing when I was starting my own company so anybody interested in starting a company or have started their company this speedrun is is for you so without further Ado let's talk about what is speedrunning details and how you can be a part of it welcome welcome everybody to deconstructor of fun podcast with I'll call this azinga reunion we have Josh Lew partner at a16z game and we have Andrew Lee Zinga OG entrepreneur and Resident at a16z welcome to the podcast guys thanks for having us thanks for

having us so um we're doing a little bit of an emergency podcast I was talking yesterday uh to Doug from for May 16z and he mentioned that be at a speed run is is happening again and that the sign up date is is close to an end so I thought that it would be a great thing to kind of get the word out um I mean it is out from the previous event but before we go into that what is speedrun so speedrun is basically our Premier accelerator at the intersection of games and technology so we're deploying um 75 million dollars um generally at 500k checks to each individual startup so if you or a person that you know is founding a company in the world of games and Technology we want to hear from them it's a very simple application 10 questions you literally do it in less than 10 minutes 15 minutes or so and then um we quickly evaluate those companies and we bring you into a cohort uh what includes is three things uh the first is it includes uh coaching it's from our network of individuals uh that include you know not

just uh investor companies that we've invested in but uh luminaries in the gaming field whether it's Mark Pincus Stephen Lim X Riot valerint Marcus Jacobs ex-king Candy Crush uh Alex Larson's guy Mavis actually infinity or Emily Greer for example who from from congregate with these great individuals who could provide coaching and mentoring in addition to our own team uh Doug McCracken Josh Lew who's on this podcast um and and others who have built billion dollar games and then we also provide a community so you're building all at the same time with this group of startups and then at the very end uh you also receive Capital not only the beginning where we give you the 500 check but at the end you will debut and basically do a demo day and show off what you built whether it's a game or a piece of technology that serves the gaming industry or might have a next-gen consumer startup that has gaming elements to it in front of more than I think the last demo day had more than 320 investors attend so it creates this really great opportunity if you want to

go ahead and fundraise as well uh post the actual experience and our whole goal behind this was I founded a gaming company back in the past I wish I dearly dearly wish that something like this existed um and that's why we created it because we want to be able to go and create a community that Fosters the next Revolution um in gaming startups and maybe maybe just quickly to add like a16z you know we invest in lots of game companies and a16z games only really wins when the games industry wins that's very important and so speedrun in many ways uh you know this is maybe not the capitalistic line but it's our love letter to the games industry you know there are so many amazing Founders out there that deserve you know more coaching more Capital more access to resources mentorship uh and you know just you know being able to talk to each other and support each other as Founders and so Steve one speedrun was really born out of you know this desire to help the games industry and of course look you know we're excited to invest in all

of these amazing Founders and companies too so you know we get something out of it too but um you know really our hope is that this is a way for us to help launch the next generation of amazing vendors industry yeah I mean I saw the videos from from the uh from the I think the inaugural uh speedrun event it looked really cool it was like an awesome party at the end all these things I might have had some friends over there that sent me some what's up pictures so I saw the behind the scenes everything was really really awesome uh but let's talk Manny there's a lot of unpack here so let's let's get the the financials out of the way so you get basically a precede of 500k and is the term sheet the same for everybody who gets selected for the precede so um you can think of the funding as we're targeting pre-seat companies so we want to Target really early stage companies companies that we think are going to benefit actually the most from having an initial injection of cash and all of this sort of like coaching and programming and mentorship community that we put together

um and so uh we are targeting pre-seed companies but uh you know we are not trying to replace the pre-seed round necessarily um every company is different and so you know some companies require more capital or less Capital than others and so you can think of as more as we are targeting basic companies and then as far as all of the term sheets um we have a standard term sheet that we offer now um generally speaking we have one term sheet so in order to apply for a speed run you have to have already company set up it can be that that let's say you're a team working at blizzard and you're thinking about it can they you know send uh an application going even before leaving the company in fact in our in our last culprit we had several companies that actually Incorporated in order to be in speedrun and even uh this cohort we've actually had a couple of companies already incorporate just to be in speedrun um and so yeah we we are definitely targeting people across the games

industry um you know people who are you know currently at a studio who have always wanted to make a company this is the program perfect so a clear forward jump start with a lot of benefits of the community and then and the coaching and you know and the backing of a16d from the from the get-go uh but let's let's continue unpacking the reality is like if you're in a studio today if you think about doing a startup it's like it's scary right like you know you're you're like in office there's snacks and coffee and like you know you get to talk to your friends and all the things maybe remote and you you know you got cool Zoom backgrounds or whatever but like you know people don't know how to start a company it's like you know a very large leap of faith in many cases and so that's also the part of speedrun is you know we want to make sure that if you're gonna make that jump you're jumping into you know the warm embrace of like you know people who have done it before a community that's going to help you along on the journey and so you don't have to do it alone so instead of it being you know cold and dark and scary and you know it's startups are hard and we can't

we can't solve all those problems but we can help a lot as you sort of like make that initial and the honestly goodness truth is if you if you just think of all these great you know these great Engineers great developers designers um you know producers who you know it's probably just as hard for them and it's a big risk for them to go ahead and try to get past the green light committee um and go through the internal politics and our perspective is very much like look like you you probably have a very informed opinion about this it's actually somewhat easier for you to just start your own company and more importantly is you get to benefit from all of that you don't have to you don't get to be encumbered by you know sort of the innovator's Dilemma that generally happens in a lot of these companies and you know on your podcast you talk about this a lot right like why is it that XYZ released this terrible game right um and yet they killed this other really great game right like these are the problems that we think should be should not exist inside the walls of these big companies which should exist out in Marketplace so that the whole industry can benefit for for sure um I mean I totally agree um yeah I wish I had something like this

when I was starting a company what does it take to apply for this like what what does a company need to deliver is it a first pitch deck or like you know 10 pages of the company and what you're doing what's team-like Etc or what what are the requirements it's pretty easy you go to I'm going to give you the URL I'll probably repeat this a couple times throughout the podcast it's literally speedrun.a16z.com um if you click the let's go button and you go to a very short less than 15 question application it's very simple in fact you can do it in less than 15 minutes but you know take some time like we ask about who your co-founders are we ask about the usual stuff right we ask about what have you built in the past what do you think about building are there other ideas that you thought about what traction to take for example that you might have but and folks might think like oh well that means I have to have built something and it needs to be out there and I need to prove that it works that's not true um for us we're much more interested in really you um the caliber of your team the idea and

then um potentially what Market you're really taking we're really actually interested to know whether you have some unique Insight given your experience um and uh whether you have uh you can basically highly iterative yeah I was gonna say as you know like when you're looking at companies this early um not a lot matters more than just the team and so we tend to spend a lot of time looking at the founders uh who they've been able to assemble and get excited about the idea and uh uh you know evidence that the founders are really passionate and want to execute you know really well at the end of the day startups are all about shifting and executing especially games you know related startups and so you know any any evidence we can see that the founders are really passionate and they have a track record of executing and or have already begun to hack away next are really good sense what would be the sort of uh like a dream founding team that you're looking for and what are the thesises that that you are investing in look there there are definitely themes that we think are Innovative and

are you know we believe will be in you know interesting things to innovate in uh in for the games industry as you can probably imagine you just see in Ai and all of these things are are things that we're looking at all of the time but uh you know early stage really is about the team and uh and you know ideas change and technology has changed when I got started in the games industry it was like Myspace games and those Facebook games and mobile games and some games and VR games etc etc you know the platforms and Technologies change all the time and so it's a lot more about A team's ability to sort of like think about where they want to innovate and then execute on it and then to answer your question about like what do we look for in teams I I don't know that there's like a a unifying theme outside of passion you should because as you know well like some of the most amazing games companies were created by games Outsiders right like you know Mark Pincus was not a you know he was he did not spend 20 years at

a triple A game you know Walter uh and team at scopely were not like games people games native people um and so uh you know we're really looking for Founders from all different backgrounds who just want to pack away and do cool things in in the game Space and have demonstrated an ability and passion for doing so and just to give you a concrete sense of some of the companies that we did the previous Speed Run batch right so we had um some uh we had we had a company called trash games for example which was building a VR uh VR Gaming company and these are young hackers who started when they were very young they were like 15 years old build apps on the App Store kept on it kept on doing better and better went to hackathons we're given Awards by by meta given Awards by Apple and then afterwards they were working on a game while they were in college and it turns out it's a really big game and they're just highly iterative that's that's a really young group for example and we were excited to have them but in addition that we had also people from like for example the tech industry never been in gaming right they've built maybe game companies in the past they're

working at some great companies a company called closing Theory um and they were just like look we've never been in games how do we we don't we played them we understand them but we don't really understand them uh we can build things can can we build something within the gaming industry there's a ton of people who want to do that and then lastly I think there's a group of folks who are I think um uh uh great Veterans for example a company by the name of torbie for example previously worked at astroneer uh the whole team had actually worked in astroneer and they have a theory on you know the world of sort of cozy MMOs which we've talked about a lot in the uh on the podcast right um and for them they were just like look we want to build the game that is the Natural Evolution for some of the experience that we've had in the past so that was another company um and probably the last one is we're also really interested in diverse Founders too right folks who may have worked um we talked about uh and um and supercell we had some supercell alums Emily Tierney and Anka um created this company called tiny Comet and um that company is focused on actually educational games in on built on top of Roblox right so you can see it's a

really wide gamut uh there isn't like we're only looking for PCs first person shooters um that do co-ops right like we're actually looking for a wide diversity that um in the world of games and technology and in terms of the uh the founding team how important it is that they have uh worked together for extensive amount of time or or like what is The Sweet Spot there because that's usually um something that I personally look for when when thinking about the Investments is like what is the other cohesion between them what's the history and it's always helpful it's I wouldn't say it's a hard requirement but it's always helpful right like you know again startups are hard and you're gonna you're gonna do lots of hard things and make lots of hard decisions and it's important that you have you know a shared working style and or shared communication style and or especially uh you know built to trust you know between the founding teams so it's definitely important but not necessarily a hard part you can you can generate all of those things by working together and being in the trenches it just takes a little extra time yeah yeah and more importantly is it right we know this as

as investors is that um you know even if you're a team that hasn't had huge amount of work experience together right your traction your your ability to execute sort of helps de-risk the proposition so um you know that's the easiest way for us to to really be able to know where the substance got legs but this is so early for us since they're all pre-seize startups we don't want folks to think that they actually have to have worked 10 years together or have something that's out in the market we're much more interested in hearing about their unique insights knowing more about the team and then seeing seeing some of that experience but more importantly um whether they've really gone down the idmas there's this this idea that and we think that in the world of games it's very much like that too right like like if if you're building something and we we later ask you well you know what are people what are what are players doing right now and you're like I don't know I mean like there's this one game that I really liked and I thought it sucked um if you haven't really gone down and really seen the whole landscape as to like whether certain approaches worked and why they didn't work um that just shows us that you know you haven't really thought nearly as much about it or been as prepared in terms of in terms of your approach understood and

so so basically I do this I do uh a Founder does this 15-minute application um they they show it they have traction whether whether they're new or whether they're super experienced in the industry or passionate about something they have some unique insights that they want to go after uh what's the next step after after that 15 minute application uh it can be really really fast um you know typically for finalists we'll bring you in for a 15-minute interview um where you know we we you get to meet a couple of the people on the team tell us live a little bit more about yourself and the team and what you're building and sort of you know why you think it's going to work uh and you know we're usually able to make a decision right after that oftentimes there are follow-ups uh because and with games sometimes you know if somebody has a build you want to like check out the builds or you know you want to look at the trailer or or you know distraction you you want to show some traction and show the metric but um but yeah the next step is actually just a 15-minute interview and then uh you

know in many cases you're you're either in you're out we're speed running this before that makes sense uh and so these interviews were will be happening during GDC am I correct or or is that the demo data yeah we should tell you the timing sorry uh so the the application deadline is within um depending on when this this podcast drops it occurs on September 30th and we might take some late applications because obviously we love the people it's a kidney construction fund you're just hearing from them but um but again it's it's within it's basically within a week um and uh what happens is those interviews will happen we will select the class almost immediately within probably a month and then um the the actual Speed Run uh program begins in January and then it lasts for 10 weeks and ends at GDC that's when you're gonna have your demo day and our perspective was for everyone to basically show off their games at demo day we are able to go ahead and grab the largest concentration of both investors as well as people within their families in our network uh to see some of the amazing

stuff that comes out of speedrun and put Folks at with their best foot forward to continue like building their great companies okay that makes total sense and you said you're going to bring people for 15 minute on site we got a lot of listeners turkey Israel a lot of European countries are you going to bring them also inside or are they going to do a zoom interview we're doing Zoom interviews good all right yeah yeah we're doing we're not we're not that backwards no we're not no I'm always thinking that they get they get to travel to La I think where you guys are so so no the interviews are happening on resume but then the the actual demo day makes sense that they go back and build something and they come in and then they get to present not only to yeah to their peers not only to hpz but I assume to about a hundred other investors or more yeah hope hopefully a lot more than that yeah hopefully yeah a lot more we have to be our previous number of 300ish one important thing to keep in mind is um the actual program itself is located in San Francisco and that the reason behind that is a lot of our team is there and

um our perspective is we want to uh if people can relocate San Francisco that's great um parts of it are required to be in because you're actually going to be in these intimate areas where you're going to be speaking with you know founders of billion dollar companies and we want to make it as as um as for that to be as as real as possible because nothing really beats sort of IRL um despite all the games that we all play um it feels like we um but uh that doesn't however mean that we don't want companies to apply from all across the world uh we care about we know that great companies out there exist um but the most important thing is that they're willing to go and come to San Francisco and stay for that 10-week period and also do their demo day at GDC and just just to add like in our last cohort we had uh you know company from India who attended we had several European companies uh and even in this cohort um these all around the world who are going to be on site just for the program uh and then

that's fantastic and you have uh some kind of a space for for the people who are coming in how does it work in in practice we're actually offering uh our our SF office so a16z's SF office is going to be a workspace for the duration of the program kickoff's going to be there you know we're going to have sort of like weekly programming there you know for for depth for demo day uh you know we're like reserving you know our office you know huge huge swath of our office for uh you know our companies to take meetings in and so we're actually offering a lot of uh that space thanks but more than likely if you're really doing a startup you're probably going to just wake up go to your computer and start working from your apartment and then and then more than likely you'll be like oh hey cool acz has that thing I gotta go in and I'm gonna go and we try to what we care a ton about is we just know start Founders are really busy so we want to you know basically make it so that our program doesn't get in the way of them building their company we're there to go and supplement and help them as much as possible to accelerate everything so it's a little bit like a white combinator right but more focused

yeah think of it like a like a y combinator for games and Technology right like um but it's different in that um you know I think that uh there's never been anything that's been this verticalized specifically on the world of consumer content on games right and I think even games themselves like games really have never had anything like this because most of the time you have like game jams like there's there's a wide it's like basically a huge Valley when you make the game jam and maybe like some CD Game Awards and maybe like a big game launch there's all these giant valleys where it's like people don't just like you know just disappear everyone's kind of working really hard and they kind of wish they had a community to be able to do it with each other makes all the sense a true accelerator in many ways like um a couple of more questions how did you get all these coaches uh to to help the founders I was looking through the site and and there's literally the who's who I mean you mentioned couple of people on this mentioning them again probably who I wrote like Mark Pincus founder of Zynga got IL Cabana the

founder of supercell he got arrowser's mini battle of Discord he got Ricardo zaconi founder of Cade and then on and on and on so my question is like maybe not how did you get them but more like how involved are they in the coaching and going through the previous course as a Founder uh how much interaction can I expect like can I can I have a a pow-out session with Mark Pink as well I've been playing San Francisco like how do they work well we're putting together the list of speakers for this next cohort and we think it's going to be many of the speakers from last quarter are are going to come in and we're going to expand it as well many of these speakers are sort of involved with the program for a couple of reasons one because they're just friends of the firm and you know we you know we we've called in a lot of favors to have these people evolve and helping these Founders dude these many of these folks are either former Executives or Founders themselves many of them are founders and you know they they remember what it was like uh you know coming up uh and you know e16z

has done the hard work assessing through many many many applications to find you know some of the most promising up-and-coming Founders and so this is a way for you know you know those those speakers and mentors to get close to you know potentially next you know generation of amazing vendors so that's another and then the third is you know these Founders are often investing in the community as well and so you know they get to you know meet the next wave of companies you know potentially get involved with very very early stages help where they think they can be the most helpful and then the last thing I'd say is you know all of these mentors are extraordinarily successful and extraordinarily busy and so it also is up to our Founders to you know find the right people to match with and then you know build a relationship we our our job as as a z games is to sort of bring the community together you can't force the community together you can only bring everybody together and that's where the amazing collisions been and so there's like individual sort of you know matchmaking relationships built

along the way and the interesting thing about it is of the founders that of the founders as well as speakers that we have right some people might think oh well it's only just sort of like Founders who've made billion dollar companies what if I wanted to go and get specific advice on fundraising for example right well it turns out like Ben Federer who's a board member of of Epic right and I see in fortnite um grow quite a bit and actually invest actively himself has a talk where he specifically talks about how to fundraise right and then in addition to that you all in addition to uh hearing from Founders as well specific advice from each of the speakers we actually have our team right from the a16z games team and that includes individuals like you know Doug McCracken who you you've gotten close with who is former supercell previously over at Riot and it was a ton about marketing and I'll tell you that from the previous class the top rated module we also have content that we provide right not just the coaching but we have individual modules on how you build a company um the top rated module was actually over go to market right which is like and we call it the attention game because our perspective is this whole

thing is like the startup game with individual sort of like microquests in between and one of the hardest ones is actually the attention game so you get Doug McCracken who previously worked with supercell you you have um on our team Lester Chen who previously was head of creators over at YouTube and you also had Justin Payne who previously worked at twitch and also was previously over it in Minecraft and both of them talked about specific attacks on how you think about working with creators for example if you're going to start working with them or what's the right way to think about how you build audience or brand or what's the best way to work with Publishers like does it matter if you get attention beforehand to what the Publishers and as we all know there's this like dance that occurs between all three of those and the good thing about it is we ourselves are our own startup right we're we make these modules and then we hear back from our Founders and then they say hey I like this I did not like this this was really useful this was not useful um I liked the speaker I didn't like the speaker as much we try to make it so that it's as useful as possible each each individual cohort every single time so every single class that we do um we

try to make it we try to basically make but have it improved um and try to make it better and better fantastic all right so let me just run through everything again and let's see if I'm if I understood everything correctly so first of all let's start with the date uh till end of this month and we're currently in September you have the time to apply you might come in a day late just use the code do app if you're a really good team you might still get in uh there's a referral there so it Don is going to truth if dof gets a referral you you also get a custom a16z mechanical keyboard oh wow so anybody listening to this by the way use code tlm like like we can't have enough of those mechanical keyboards that destroy every podcast that I've been sold it would record but uh but no no that'll be really cool I would just like know how many listeners many get applied and funded but yeah use code Deal app by by the end of next by the end of this month um it takes you 15 minutes to apply minimum but you'll probably end up spending 45 minutes because you're a very thorough uh future founder at once

do you want to get their idea across you're going to spend probably a few days talking to people you want to work with now is the time you can take the leap of Fate um then that application goes to the Fine uh ladies and gentlemen at actcz games fund they will take a read they will have a 15-minute call with you no matter where in the world you are uh and after that and possibly a couple of uh follow-ups maybe trying demo kind of seeing a little bit more what what you're up to how far you've gone uh you'll get the uh the verdict and that verdict of course because you listen to the podcast you're very well versed so that verdict will be most likely yes and that will give you the other half a million funding and that gives you also the ticket to the uh the fine USA and the uh the Rowdy city of San Francisco where you locate for 10 weeks working day and night uh on your demo that you're gonna present at GDC in front of over 300 investors from the best of the

best funds from around the world um but what's going to help you is is first of all you're quite isolated most likely there's no hustle and bustle of where you live because now you your 10 weeks in San Francisco you can't go outside because it's kind of scary but that's a different story uh just in this case and then um there's gonna be you're going to be able to connect to some of the uh the best Founders in gaming and Tech that you can find um you know the biggest thing uh and those will be valuable connections um they will tell you about their stories and they will give you a ride or they'll give you the direction that you won't get anywhere else but you also get the help from a6dz crew that I've seen a lot of companies throughout the time and they don't want you to feed and you have what's unique about a16z as I've been interacting with with uh Jordan with Doug with others is like you have a lot of true Specialists whether the former marketing lead or supercell whether it's former lead from YouTube creators but

it's former lead of hiring or recruitment at Riot so there's a lot of professionals that you will get a lot of information from uh and help from but nevertheless 95 of your time will be on that demo because it's going to be it's going to be a tough crowd you're going to be presenting and then in GDC you'll be in front of everybody who actually writes the check at once and that's when you get your seed route and you're off accelerating towards um unicorn status did I get it right that's right the one thing that I would add is your journey with us does not end at a demo day um you will be part of an amazing alumni group you will be in our network uh you know we continue to help our companies so once you're in the family yeah and just to make sure that folks like think like oh well how does it truly benefit me let me give you some real numbers which is that out of the last demo day of all the companies that that demoed 80 of them raised Fallen One financing right they all were able to go ahead and raise Fallen financing that we were

actually surprised ourselves we were honestly actually surprised ourselves um but it just goes to tell you that the gaming industry has been waiting for something like this right so many people want to build things at the intersection of games and Technology whether it's new things at the forefronts you know all the different forefronts whether it's you know new platforms AI um whether if if you take for example you're just one person who's like absolutely astounded by vrar and apple Vision Pro like we want to hear from you and and the truth is that there's no other vehicle like this outside of speedrun um and it just goes to show that actually you know if we do this right we can we can really actually create a revolution in the world of gaming and I think that's something that the you know the dof has been trying to do that for a long while all the complaints every single episode right this is this is your vehicle if you've been hearing the complaints and you're like I want to do something I need to do something this is your ability to do it and we got 75 million dollars to go and help uh you know put put money where where that account is no I don't know if we're complaining that much we're swayzing

we're waiting against legitimate concerns there's there's two ways you can start a company there's the way we don't do this the uh the precede but you're kind of bootstrapped for a long way get get you know further along raise a seed round slow way it's uh it's a tough way nothing wrong with that what I like about this program is the amount of support you're getting just through the uh the connections and you know you guys are you know huge Fund in terms of both sides and influence and um and the speakers that you have and the mentors that you have kind of speak for it so Andrew I think this was your idea initially the speed run I think it's a really cool idea and um excited to see how this evolves and I hope that there's going to be a lot of applications from around the world and you'll see a very diverse group targeting very different segments of the games industry I mean it since we're talking about a Zinger reunion this is sort of like this was sort of like the dream that we could make games quickly remember guys we could have shared we would have shared technology we'd have

Innovation happen all the time and I I think the thing is that dream is still trying to be had um I mean Josh spent all this time at blizzard building you know working on billion dollar games and and even then I mean I'm sure Josh you can talk about the experience I mean you sort of wish that there was some some process like this too yeah for sure we just have to make sure that there will be no product yes I I promise no project reviews as part of speech yeah only only doing and only looking at the software and only moving forward um thank you guys this is this is really cool thing I'm very happy that we're able to get the word out as soon as possible and make sure that you get maximum application for not only this one but also for the future one because most likely some people are listening they don't quite have the idea or maybe they're not sure about the team or maybe one person in the team is not ready right now I assume that these will be happening at uh rather frequent intervals and there will be the next speed run that you'll be able to apply so even if you don't apply now get ready for the next one right we will be

running yeah so stay tuned thanks for having us on on such short notice this has been really awesome yeah I'm excited to go ahead and send you your uh your dof uh acts games mechanical keyboard um if you're listening out there the man needs a keyboard yeah that's that's 100 true so you love code and apply next week and just get ready this is a cool thing I wish this would have been there when when I started my company so on that note thank you thank you Josh and thank you everybody for listening goodbye everybody thanks y'all thanks